girl, I want the girl. It’s no reason to fight, huh? And Catalina is a sweet thing too. Come, come, don’t be dull.”
Francis had picked up the knife she had dropped, and now he held it up. “You won’t hurt them.”
“Are you going to try and stab me? I should warn you I’m a little harder to kill than a woman. Yes, Francis, you managed to kill your mother. Over what? A girl? And now? It’s my turn?”
“Go to hell!”
Francis rushed toward Virgil, but he suddenly halted, his hand frozen in midair, the knife tight in his grip. Noemí couldn’t see his face but she could imagine it. It must mirror her expression, for she too had become a statue, and Catalina stood in absolute stillness.
The bees stirred, the buzzing began. Look.
“Don’t make me kill you,” Virgil warned him, and his hand fell upon Francis’s trembling hand. “Yield.”
Francis shoved Virgil away, sending Virgil crashing against the wall with a strength that seemed impossible.
For one split second she felt Virgil’s pain, the tug of adrenaline rushing through her veins, his fury mingled with her own. Francis, you little shit. It was the gloom, connecting them for a brief instant, and she yelped, almost biting her tongue. She stepped back, her feet slowly obeying her. One, two steps.
Virgil frowned. His eyes seemed to glow gold as he stepped forward and brushed off tiny bits of mushrooms and dust that had adhered to his jacket.
The buzzing bubbled up, first low, then rumbling into life, and she winced.
“Yield.”
Francis groaned his answer and flung himself against Virgil once more. His cousin stopped him with ease. He was much stronger, and this time he was prepared for an attack. He caught Francis’s desperate punch, returning it with vicious abandon, hitting Francis in the head. Francis stumbled yet managed to regain his balance and struck back. His fist connected with Virgil’s mouth, and Virgil let out an angry, startled gasp.
Virgil’s eyes narrowed as he wiped his mouth clean.
“I’ll make you bite off your own tongue,” Virgil said simply.
The men had changed positions, and now Noemí could see Francis’s face, the blood welling down his temple as he heaved and shook his head, and Noemí saw the way his eyes were open wide and the way his hands were shaking and how his mouth was opening and closing, like a fish gasping for air.
Dear God, Virgil was going to make him do it. He would make him eat his own tongue.
Noemí heard the growing buzzing of bees behind her.
Look.
She turned around, and her eyes fell on the face of Agnes, her lipless mouth set in an eternal circle of pain, and she pressed her hands against her ears, furiously wondering why it wouldn’t stop. Why that noise wouldn’t cease, returning over and over again.
And it struck her all of a sudden this fact that she had missed, which should have been obvious from the very beginning: that the frightening and twisted gloom that surrounded them was the manifestation of all the suffering that had been inflicted on this woman. Agnes. Driven to madness, driven to anger, driven to despair, and even now a sliver of that woman remained, and that sliver was still screaming in agony.
She was the snake biting its tail.
She was a dreamer, eternally bound to a nightmare, eyes closed even when her eyes had turned to dust.
The buzzing was her voice. She could not communicate properly any longer but could still scream of unspeakable horrors inflicted on her, of ruin and pain. Even when coherent memory and thought had been scraped away, this searing rage remained, burning the minds of any who wandered near it. What did she wish?
Simply to be released from this torment.
Simply to wake up. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t ever wake.
The buzzing was growing, threatening to hurt Noemí again and overwhelm her mind, but she reached down and grabbed the oil lamp with quick, rough fingers and rather than thinking about what she was about to do, she thought of that single phrase that Ruth had spoken. Open your eyes, open your eyes, and her steps were quick and determined, and for each step she whispered open your eyes.
Until she was staring at Agnes again.
“Sleepwalker,” she whispered. “Time to open your eyes.”
She tossed the lamp against the corpse’s face. It instantly ignited the mushrooms around Agnes’s head, creating a halo of fire, and then tongues of fire began to spread quickly down the wall, the organic matter apparently